Wild landscapes and avoiding police procedure: Geoff Parkes (ANZ Author Interviews #1)

Sheep grazing in the King Country, the setting for Geoff Parkes' novels

Craig every second Tuesday

Kia ora and gidday everyone,

I hope that you’ve all enjoyed some joyful moments over the festive season and the beginnings of this new year. I ended 2025 and began 2026 by spending several days volunteering with Crisis, the homelessness charity. As I mentioned in the lead-up to Christmas, I first got involved with the Crisis at Christmas annual campaign, somewhat by accident, in 2015 when I was stranded solo in the UK for the festive season thanks to visa applications and slow-moving bureaucracy. It's a pretty remarkable charity that, like several others, makes a real difference to a pressing issue.

Over the holiday season I also found myself reflecting on lots of bookish highlights from the past year or so – great reads and great events  and good times with great people – as well as looking ahead to what may be in store in the year ahead. Lots to look forward to, hopefully, for all of us. 

I feel very lucky to get to chair some amazing crime writers
at great festivals and events like Bloody Scotland

I don't know about you, but I certainly find - even if I need to regularly remind myself - that among all the seeming chaos at times of the world, or challenges in our working or personal lives, that reading is this absolutely wonderful thing that provides not only entertainment and/or education, but calms my mind and like a walk in nature or a conversation with friends, grounds or resets me in a good way.

At Capital Crime last year with cool Aussie crime
writers Hayley Scrivenor, Kate Kemp, and Chris
Hammer and fab Turkish author Elcin Poyrazlar

An hour or two spent with a good book is about more than what you read, even if that's great in of itself. Especially in our age of social media and smartphone scrolling, and a constant barrage of news and negativity, ads and algorithms. So I'm very grateful for all the wonderful storytellers out there (along with publishers, editors, libraries, and booksellers, etc) who create wonderful tales, fictional or factual or a mixture of both, for us to enjoy. 

I thought to kickstart this year - and given I'm meant to bring an Australian and New Zealand or 'Down Under' perspective to Murder is Everywhere - that I would introduce a wee ongoing series here in my semi-regular column: ANZ author interviews. Throughout this year I'll aim to feature a different Australian or New Zealand crime, mystery, or thriller author - past or present - in each of my columns, in among whatever else I may muse upon that fortnight. 

Sound good? Hope so. 

Some of the authors may be well-known, others fantastic but overlooked, others exciting new voices. Each has something to offer for readers out there, and is worth checking out. 

A new voice in ANZ crime: Geoff Parkes

ANZ Author Interviews: Geoff Parkes

To kick things off, I thought I'd highlight a relatively new voice who spans both countries: Geoff Parkes is a Melbourne-based businessman and writer who grew up among the farming landscapes of the rural King Country district in New Zealand, the setting for his terrific 2025 crime fiction debut When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole, published by Penguin Australia. For the past dozen or so years Geoff has written a popular weekly opinion column for The Roar, Australia’s leading online sports website. So why the switch to fiction?

(note: this interview was conducted last year, prior to the recent publication in January 2026 in Australia and New Zealand of Geoff's second novel, The First Law of the Bush, which is a 'ten years later' a sequel to his debut)

Geoff's debut, When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole, is a multi-narrator rural mystery set in 1980s New Zealand in a rugged farming community where law student Ryan Bradley has returned to his remote home town for the university summer holidays, earning money by working long hours on a sheep shearing gang while haunted by the memories of Sanna Sovernan, a Finnish backpacker and his secret lover, who worked with him the summer before, then vanished. Now Sanna's sister Emilia has arrived from Finland, determined to get answers, and wanting Ryan's help. Because she knows her sister was not the first female traveller in the area to disappear... 

CS: Given your long-time involvement with writing about Australasian sport, including two non-fiction books about rugby, what inspired you to write a novel, and a crime novel in particular?

Geoff Parkes: I always had this idea that I wanted to write fiction, and crime fiction was an obvious place as I’ve always been interested in crime, watched a lot of TV crime dramas, and like most people I read a fair bit of mystery and thriller books when I was young – all of the Agatha Christies, some Ngaio Marsh, even Dick Francis. I’m a mad keen sportsperson so he was like winning the lottery, combing sports – horse racing, in his case – with crimes. That was a real winner for me. 

So I always had the interest, but with respect to When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole, what I was most motivated to write about was my home region of the King Country. I blended crime with my experience working sheep shearing gangs in the summer while I was at university, and I built the plot around the location and the aspects of rural life that go along with that.

CS: Despite Australia and New Zealand being former British colonies, ‘Down Under’ rural crime fiction seems to have a very different feel to its traditional British equivalent - where as readers we grew up with village murder mysteries, dark deeds happening in bucolic countryside. For me, there’s a wildness, closer connection to nature, a rugged magnificence and hovering sense of the cycle of life and death in Australasian rural mysteries – was that something you were aware of while writing your debut crime novel?

Geoff: Definitely. Particularly in Australia, you’ve got elements like extreme heat, and animals that can kill you, snakes and spiders and stuff. Or people who are a bit deranged wandering around the Outback. In New Zealand, we don’t necessarily have the animal threat, but the landscape itself, with weather changes and rivers etc can be very intimidating and dangerous, especially for people not used to it. So it really adds an element. Whereas in the UK - and perhaps there’s exceptions around the Moors - mostly the rural stuff, perhaps because of TV, we tend to associate more with cozier crime, green fields, and the threat comes more from mad vicars or things like that.

Deadly landscapes often give Australasian rural crime, like 
"Mystery Road", a grittier, wilder feel to its British counterparts 

CS: One of the many things I really enjoyed about your terrific crime debut was the way you took us into the perspectives of many different characters, across different time periods, even if Ryan, Emilia, and Sanna were the central figures. What made you take that kaleidoscopic perspective?

Geoff: While it’s a crime novel, I was pretty determined not to make When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole procedural in any way, and that the main character wouldn’t be a police officer or professional detective. Once I started, I realised I wanted to tell a story not just from the main character’s perspective, and I realised for me it was actually easier to write it like a movie, and it was very visual to me while writing. So at the start of each scene it was like ‘whose story is this scene, and from what perspective do I want to tell it?’ I just felt it was more interesting to write it from different characters perspectives as much as I could. I know that’s not going to be something everybody will embrace, but I’d like to think it helps maintain interest, and I’ve done the same thing again for my next book, where I’m not scared to tell a chapter from a more minor character’s perspective, because they’re all important. They’re all in there because they’re integral to the story.

I’m very curious about your next novel, given the quality of your first but the fact that it’s not really centred on a singular sleuth or naturally set up for a series in a more traditional way. There are several really interesting characters I think readers may like to see more from, that perhaps you could bring forward into another novel. Is there much of a connection between your debut and the next book you’re working on now, even if just sharing a similar 1980s rural New Zealand setting, for instance – or is the next book a complete standalone?

Geoff: No, you've absolutely nailed it there, Craig, so there is a connection, but not to the extent where it's a series or a traditional sequel. So my second book is set ten years later, and there are three or so characters who carry on through, one of which is Ryan, who was a law student back home for the summer holidays, working on a shearing gang to earn money, in the first book. Ten years later, Ryan is living in the town of Nashville, as a practicing lawyer.

So he is I guess the glue of the second book, but there’s a different crime, a different setup, there’s no shearing gang or anything like that. So people will be able to read the second book entirely as a standalone, and they won't be impacted at all by not having read my first novel, but people who read the first book, who then go on to the second, everything will make a lot of sense to them. So there is a connection and a continuation, but it's not an essential connection, or it's not overly strong, compared to most series.

Thanks, Geoff! 

Since the time of our interview, Geoff's second crime novel, The First Law of the Bush has also been published (Penguin Australia, January 2026). As Geoff discussed, it is set a decade later, in 1990s rural New Zealand, with Ryan Bradley having returned to Nashville to work as a local lawyer. He's hired by the widow of a railway worker who is looking for answers after her husband died on the job the year before. Was it a tragic accident, suicide, or something else? 

The railway company is denying any responsibility, the widow's old friends are shunning her, and her husband's workmates Gav Coates and Wati Reynolds claim not to know what went wrong on the deadly day. Meanwhile various criminal enterprises are bubbling away in the town, and the local police sergeant is looking the other way. What is really going on in the town of Nashville, and can Ryan uncover the truth before anyone else dies?

You can read an excerpt here, thanks to Good Reading magazine. 

As a reader and reviewer I really enjoyed both of Geoff's first two crime novels: he's a strong new voice in Australasian mystery and thriller writing, or 'Southern Cross Crime', that brings a really authentic feel to the rural landscapes and the farming and smalltown communities in his books. 

I'm looking forward to more books from Geoff Parkes in future. 

Have you read any crime novels set in rural Australia or New Zealand? 

Until next time. Ka kite anō.

Whakataukī of the fortnight: 

Inspired by Zoe and her 'word of the week', I'll be ending my fortnightly posts by sharing a whakataukī (Māori proverb), a pithy and poetic thought to mull on as we go through life.

Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi

(With your food basket and my food basket the people will thrive, ie everybody has something to offer, and by working together we can all flourish.)

Dozens of crime writers from New Zealand, Australia, and internationally coming
together at a local marae to celebrate storytelling at Rotorua Noir in 2019.